The fact that this monument is tucked
away, almost forgotten, in a back street most often used to access a
multi-story car park, is a curiosity, albeit one that seems somehow
typical of Croydon’s unique and often perplexing character. It most
certainly befits Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s own legacy.

Outside Croydon, he is a largely
forgotten figure in classical music and even within the borough’s
borders he is under-appreciated, wheeled out by teachers as a subject
for Black History month and then tucked away again until next year. And
that is a true shame, because Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s story is a
remarkable one. Indeed it is one that would be considered remarkable if
he was born today, let alone in the late nineteenth century.

The details of his early life are murky.
His father, Daniel Taylor, who the young Samuel never knew, was a
Creole from Sierra Leone; his mother, Alice Martin, was a white woman
from Holborn, central London. The area he was born in was described by
Charles Dickens, no less, as “the dingiest collection of shabby
buildings ever squeezed together”. It isn’t known how Coleridge-Taylor
and his mother escaped these inauspicious beginnings and ended up in the
comparative luxury of Croydon, in those days sedate suburbia yet to be
engulfed by the city. However it happened, Coleridge-Taylor fell on his
feet: his mother married George Evans, a railway storeman, who became a
father figure to Samuel. It was in Croydon that Coleridge-Taylor
received his first music lessons courtesy of a Colonel Hebert A.
Walters, the choirmaster at St George’s church, awakening a rare and
unexpected talent.

This talent was enough to earn him a
scholarship at the prestigious Royal College of Music. Samuel excelled
in his studies and was quickly propelled into the upper echelons of
English music. Soon after graduating, his music was being published and
he won the Lesley Alexander composition prize for two consecutive years.
Indeed. his first major commission was from the great composer Edward
Elgar. For anyone making a career in the music world at that time this
was validation of the highest order.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was critically
lauded, being famously labelled ‘the African Mahler’, as well as being
hugely popular. His choral music was played at concerts across the
country and his acclaim peaked when he released Hiawatha’s Wedding Feastin 1898. Despite this, he was not always rewarded for his efforts and had sold the rights to Hiawatha for only
£25 15s. When it was revealed that his family would receive no
royalties from the song after his death, it caused a scandal in the
music world and became one of the landmark cases in establishing the Performing Rights Society, a organisation which exists to this day to ensure that musicians are paid when their music is performed commercially.

He was invited to meet the US president, no small thing at the time for a mixed-race child from the slums born out of wedlock

Coleridge-Taylor was forced to work as a
conductor, a music teacher and an adjudicator at various festivals and
competitions to make ends meet, but he was far from finished. At college
he had met an American poet named Paul Laurence Dunbar who added words
to his music in a series of collaborations and awakened his interest in
his African roots. This brought him to the attention of the United
States and African-Americans often sought him out when visiting London.
His popularity across the pond was such that on one visit to the US he
was invited to meet Thomas Jefferson, the then president. This was no
small thing for a mixed-race, illegitimate child of the slums to achieve
in the early twentieth century. Perhaps more remarkable still was the
fact that while in America he was allowed to conduct all-white
orchestras on a tour in 1910: this in a country that didn’t allow black
people to sit in the same seats as white people on the bus more than
fifty years later.

He was a busy man, much in demand.
Sadly, however, the strain of furthering his music career, working his
day jobs and being a doting father and husband took their toll on him.
In August 1912 Samuel Coleridge-Taylor collapsed at West Croydon
station, aged thirty-seven. He died a few days later of pneumonia and
was buried in Bandon Hill Cemetery in Wallington. His was a short,
eventful and important life.